On each of our trips to the UK we have rented a car. Perhaps that should read "hired" a car because that's more the way Brits would say it.
We've settled on using the company called Sixt because not only are they competitively priced, but they have a desk and a heap of cars actually in Terminal 5 at the airport, and that obviates the need to clamber aboard a minibus and be ferried out to a car hire depot, even if it's only just beyond the airport's perimeter fence.
This year I'd booked a "Compact SUV", something like a Skoda, and settled on a fee for the 21 days we needed to rent the car. Pitching up up at the Sixt desk, I presented the agent with the news that I didn't want to pay more than the quoted figure (so no upselling, buster!) and the fellow took it on the chin. He did, however, insist that if we proceeded with the booking and the key collection using their mobile app, then we could have a "free upgrade". We let the agent guide us through the said app, ascertained that the price was right, and mooched off down to the car parking area to collect the key for a Peugeot 3008 "slightly bigger than a compact" SUV.
There was a bit of jiggery pokery as we had a bit of bother locating the correct key, but with help from the good people in the office, we were united with both key and car.
The car is big and black. It's a plug-in hybrid and is almost brand new. It also has a host of features that even a week into driving the car, we still haven't cracked. However, as a means of getting us from the airport to our holiday home, it served its purpose without fuss, so that much we are grateful for. I will say here and now, though, that if Peugeot cars were sold in Canada, this 3008 model wouldn't merit my consideration.
The car is at least an automatic, something that was my base line requirement. I can drive stick-shift cars, I did for 25 years, but to go back to manual after years of driving automatics wasn't something I wanted to do, even given that automatic hire cars cost more to rent. Finding the gear-shift, though, wasn't as easy as it should have been; it turned out to be a switch (and a button) on the dashboard. I get it, more electronics, less mechanical, but it still wasn't obvious.
The steering wheel isn't round, it's a circle flattened off top and bottom. I suppose it'd help if you wanted to raise your seat up high and not have the bottom of the steering wheel interfering with your legs, but adjustable steering wheels, and this is one, would solve that issue. Other than that I can see no reason for the wheel shape, other than fashion. It doesn't impede driving of course, but it seems a wee bit unneccessary.
There are a range of switches on the centre console, and on the dash, and there's something called "iToggle", which I haven't yet worked out, but the bulk of the car's controls are handled by a curved touch-screen on the dashboard that stretches the width of the driver's area. It looks very fancy and is, or at least half of it is, the customary speedometer and idiot lights that you'd get on any car. The other half is where you access things like the navigation system, the climate control, the car's settings, and anything else those cunning French automotive people wanted to put there. It's all fine and dandy, except that there's far too much information there for the casual driver to absorb, and many of the control screens are hidden in layers beneath the home screen. At a basic level, to get the seat heater control, you have to go one screen down (by swiping left, or pressing a button on the console), then select from a display, something that would require too much time looking at the screen if you were driving. It'd be easy to switch on your seat heater while stopped, but switching it back off again would typically be required while moving, so ferreting around in layers of screens to achieve someting that a phyiscal switch could just as easily manage doesn't seem like progress to me. Of course putting switches on a touch-screen is cheaper than having a physical switch, so I guess progress is really about making money.
Finding out how to dim the ambient lighting in the cabin was something else again. Part of the dashboard decoration is lit when the headlights are on. By default, that lighting is far too bright when driving at night and reflected off the side windows and windscreen, and that did interfere with night driving. I'm not kidding when I say it took us two days of Internet searching to find out how to access the ambient lighting settings on the touch-screen. It was two screens down, and three or four steps in a menu. That is hardly intuitive.
But this is a common issue with moden cars. They nearly all come equipped with touch screens in one form or another, and the designers bury controls under layers of screens and menus, all of which will take the driver's attention away from the road should they try to access any switches while moving. Despite instructions to avoid using said screens on the move, I'd say that is nigh on impossible if you're needing to adjust things like heating and cooling.
Anyway, I have my co-pilot who deals with these things, which is the only safe way of doing things.
It took me a couple of days to find out how to work the Cruise Control (called Assist on this car), and there's something called "Limit" that I haven't worked out how to use yet. I'm not all together certain how the navigation system works, whether it's using GPS or cell phone towers for location. I do know that it only guesses at what the speed limit is. For example, the road from our cottage to the A38 may be a narrow country lane, but the national speed limit applies, and that is 60 mph. For some reason, the navigation system tells me that the limit is 30 mph, which is just plain wrong. Then, on the A38, the National Speed Limit applies, and because it's a dual carriageway that means 70 mph. The navigation system flip-flops between 60 and 70 mph, for reasons I can't fathom, and yet it knows that the temporary limit through the road works is 40 mph. Go figure. It's a good job that I understand how speed limits work in the UK because the car certainly doesn't. Google Maps is far better on speed limits, so if you were confused, you'd best consult Google.
The Peugeot drives quite nicely, albeit not as economically as I'd like, even with the hybrid help. The Skoda we had a couple of years back was far better, although that was a fair bit smaller than this Peugeot.
I though that the car's luggage space was a bit skimpy, that was until I discovered a seperate compartment under the floor of the rear luggage area. There's a plug-in cable in there at the moment, but as we don't have anywhere to plug the car in, thats where it's staying.
I also discovered yesterday that if you apply the parking brake, say on a steep hill, just moving the car forward will release it automatically, which is a handy feature. In fact, that's the only feature that I've thought worth the effort so far. Hey, I'm just too cynical.
We have two more weeks of the Peugeot, and I'm sure I'll get more used to it. I'm still looking forward to getting back to the old school switches and levers on our 15-year-old Toyota, though.
